Drilling Through Injury Rates!

Two North Sea drilling platforms reduce Lost-time injuries by 97%, with both platforms recording their first ever 12 month periods without a lost-time injury. Minor injuries also reduced by 50%.

Injuries in the North Sea had decreased from 1984 to 1993, but ‘bottomed-out until 1997 or so. Over the next two years, a slight increase in injuries occurred. A North Sea Operator realized many of their incidents were related to ‘behavioral deficiencies’.

After attending a behavior-based safety conference, they decided to implement the B-Safe® process. Initially, this began on two platforms in UK waters, close to the Norwegian Sector. B-Safe® began with ‘Tell & Sell’ sessions with crews on both platforms, inclusive of contractors such as KCA Drilling and Aramark. Positive employee feedback persuaded management to support the initiative.

TrainingImplementation began with the training of two project teams, one from each platform, who were trained together ‘onshore’ over a five day period, to implement the process. This covered checklist development, managerial alignment, training observers, goal-setting, feedback and data entry & analysis.

Checklist DevelopmentThe project teams identifed unsafe behaviors by analyzing the previous two years incident records. These were developed into ‘Behavioral Observation Checklists’ of safe behaviors for 49 observation areas in 17 departments. These were approved by the crews before use.

Process100 volunteer observers were recruited and trained to use the checklists, give feedback and set targets with their workgroups. The observers monitored their colleagues in their platform areas for 10-20 minutes a day for four weeks, to find out how safe people worked.

Each workgroup then set an improvement target. Observers continued to monitor daily and gave feedback when observing people and at weekly feedback meetings. The project team rigourously followed up any corrective actions, the status of which was reported back to the workgroups. This cycle of events was repeated every 30 weeks or so.

ResultsIn the first 15 months, Lost-time injuries reduced by 97%, with both platforms recording their first ever 12 month periods without a lost-time injury. Minor injuries also reduced by 50%

The project was soon expanded to other offshore platforms in the southern sector of the North Sea and onshore sites that included the Company’s administrative offices and the Sage St Fergus Terminal.

In 2005, KCA DEUTAG (Drilling Contractors) won an IADC Merit Award for working six years without a reportable injury on the Bravo platform.